


Quiet

by marietcaelum



Category: Primeval
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Profanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-09 20:46:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4363610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marietcaelum/pseuds/marietcaelum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ARC team really needs to get their game together as far as hiding from monsters is concerned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quiet

It had been three, _three_ fucking times now that one of the team had been nearly injured (or worse) because a predator overheard them whispering, and Becker had to put his foot down. Once was an accident, twice was bad luck, but three times was a genuine problem, and one that it took about five minutes to come up with a solution to.

Military hand signals, basic enough that the team could communicate without having to learn the entirety of BSL, but with hopefully enough nuance to get the point across. In short, enough to get the core team moving efficiently without giving away their position every damn time somebody needed to know something.

It wasn't quite as easy as it looked on paper, naturally. For one thing, though admirably developed for dealing with armed combatants, British military hand signals were somewhat lacking when it came to dinosaurs. A few gestures had to be improvised to that end, ones to distinguish between large and small creatures, herbivores and predators, and whether the incursion had armour or not.

There was a lot of variance in how fast the team members picked it up. Becker, of course, had had most of it drilled into him in basic training; the anomaly related ones didn't take much effort to file away for later use. Matt was eerily proficient with the actual signing, but every so often fumbled with a simple gesture or used something entirely wrong. There was a brief look of frustration every time that happened; as if he knew something similar, but just different enough to cause problems. Maybe some specialised or pidgin form of it? Either way, once he'd gotten the hang of it he tended to liberally sprinkle obscene gestures through as a sort of punctuation. Best bet was an attempt to exasperate Becker so much that his eyes would roll up into the back of his head and he passed out from sarcasm overload.

The joke was on him if that _was_ the plan, because in Becker's squad what Matt did was pretty much standard practice whenever an op went tits up. They had better expletives too, come to think of it. Becker made an executive decision not to mention that, letting Matt have his fun in favour of maintaining a somewhat professional reputation.

Connor, meanwhile, had found the one and only skill that he couldn't quite pick up. The theory was fine; he had memorised all the gestures, it was just executing and interpreting them that he couldn't quite manage. Keeping track of a string of movements and mapping them to actual words was bad enough, but his co-ordination was so terrible that he wasn't quite comprehensible, either. Abby, by contrast, was a natural. She got good fast, and it was a testament to her patience that she was willing to go through it with him again and again until he got the hang of it. Becker caught him cycling through the gestures and muttering under his breath one day, and ended up giving him a bit of extra practice in the breakroom during the lull between one crisis and the next. He managed to knock a cup of coffee off the counter with a couple of more vigorous gestures, and it was marked down - rather generously of him, Becker thought to himself - as a casualty of war.

It was worth the trouble, even the loss of his coffee, the first time a creature walked right past them and never even knew they were there - the lot of them forgot to look at each other in the field every so often, which just resulted in Becker making a few of the less PC gestures at their backs. Connor still blanked out every so often when someone was trying to let him know something complicated. Matt still thought - still _think's_ , worse luck - that he' was hilarious. On the whole though, Becker's pretty damn proud of the lot of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly inspired by S04E04, where you can just see Matt making some handsignals to Connor so they could stealth it up. Clearly this needed further exploration.  
> Beta credit goes to kirawonrey. :)


End file.
